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UEFI provides a "monotonic boot counter" which is supposed to increase on each reboot. We can include this in our random seed hash logic, which makes things more robust in case our changes to the ESP end up not actually being as persistent as we assume. As long as the monotonic boot counter increases we should be good, as each boot we'll anyway end up with a new seed that way. This in fact should also pave the way that we can eventually enable the random seed logic even on SecureBoot enabled systems. Why that? With this change the input for the random seed hash is now: 1. the old seed file contents 2. (optionally) some bits from the UEFI RNG 3. (optionally) a per system random "token" stored in an UEFI variable, initialized at OS install 4. the UEFI monotonic counter 5. a counter integer used by the random seed logic. We can ignore #5 entirely for security considerations, it's always going to be a constant series of values determined by the random seed logic. The #1 file is under control of the attacker. (Since it resides in the unprotected ESP) The #2 data is possibly low quality. (it's hard enough to trust the quality of the Linux RNG, let's not go as far as trusting the UEFI one) The #3 data should not be under control of the attacker, and should only exist if explicitly set. Unless you have privileged access to the system you should not be able to read or set it. (well, within limits of flash chip security and its connectivity to the firmware) The #4 data is provided by the firmware, and should not be under control of the attacker. If it works correctly then it might still be guessable (i.e. a new system might have the counter close to zero). Thus: 1+2+5 are guessable/under control of attacker, but 3+4 should not be. Thus, if 3 is not known to attacker and not guessable, and 4 strictly monotonically increasing then it should be enough to guarantee that every boot will get a different seed passed in, that should not be known or guessable by the attacker. That all said, this patch does not enable the random seed logic on SecureBoot. That is left for a later patch.